13 ms·

The Tcl War (1994)

85 points by akkartik 10y ago

SFJulie 10y ago
I love how RMS always begin is war on language with "it does not have a LISP/scheme syntax". University coders and their obsession of purity of syntax (map/purity) superior to actually dealing with the true problem of the hardware is looking (territory/practicality) is looking for me like an Aristolecian argument of superiority of the style over the «getting things done». Well, as spotted in the answers, expect is a nice non university bred innovation (is it?) that is still a de facto standard in handling interactive session (stateful) with a simple syntax that helps getting things done with maintainable code. It is ported in Perl, python ... and I think this is probably a point for what Tcl is worthy : getting things done. Practicality beats purity. And as of today it is still the most portable way to write embeddable graphical user interface that have good FFI.
- eru 10y ago
  Lisps ain't particularly pure.. They are closer to the practical side of things. RMS is of course a bit nuts, and perhaps living in some kind of ivory tower, but it's not the academic ivory tower.
  - _acme 10y ago
    I thought he literally lived in one of MIT's office/academic buildings rather than having an actual apartment?
    - eru 10y ago
      Oh, I meant where he's living intellectually. But I think my perception of what classifies an academic is pretty skewed: I managed to code Haskell for money for the first five years of my career (now still sneaking it in at Google in my 20% time), and don't consider myself an academic at all. Perhaps I also have a European bias here. After the war, the Americans got to play with their computers early on, and their academics ended up with Lisp. The European computer scientists had to wait, and thus had nothing better to do but think. They ended up with types and ML (the family that Haskell sprang from). These days, it seems that the European tradition has firmly won in the most academic parts of computer science. Lisps are still around, and with Clojure have seen more mainstream success that ever before. But in Academia the only Lispers left standing seem to be the Schemers, and they have warmed up to static types, too. (They did some great work on contracts.)
- yenda 10y ago
  It wasn't RMS who wrote this post, it was a prank
  - glv 10y ago
    It did later come out that Tom Lord wrote it, but not as a prank; he was working with RMS to build Guile, and this was the opening salvo in trying to build the case for it. RMS did post it under his own name.
  - SFJulie 10y ago
    Well, fake money is well done when it looks as good as the original :) Just for saying I did not invent the lisp/scheme obsession directly from his web page[1] : The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't know what it means for a programming language to be powerful and elegant. Once you learn Lisp, you will see what is lacking in most other languages. [1] https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Lisp is close to syntaxless. What "lisp syntax" means is principled to the bones systems, including syntax. The fact that everything in lisp was in recursively defined lists meant you could reuse recursive thinking everywhere. An `infinite` tower of reuse. You get genericity, pattern matching, combinatorial generation for very low cost. It's not practical for people crunching data or opening files .. but whenever you need to attack something a little more complex the 'practicality' argument shift sides.
  - lawpoop 10y ago
    Well, if he meant "it doesn't have S-expressions", he should have said that. That's not an unreasonable expectation for a guy who is otherwise a pedant in almost all other areas of his life.
    - agumonkey 10y ago
      Fair point, and to be honest, it's a common problem in many places. People enjoying a property often fail to communicate it clearly with those who never did. Math, and I believe Lisp has many times more inherited math genes than other languages, is especially guilty of this. It's often a lethal cultural shock.
      - eru 10y ago
        S-Expressions are fun. When I first learned a Lisp, Scheme in my case, I found them weird but could see the appeal. When I learned Haskell afterwards, it was the opposite: I thought I'd miss S-Expressions, but I learned to like its more baroque syntax. S-Expressions have the chief virtue of making even the most crude macro look no different from the most over-engineered builtin to the language from the user's point of view. And they clearly separate the syntactical space in the language, so that new features (whether as macro or built-in) can always find a space. Compare to the cracks of C they had to fit C++ into. Haskell might be even worse. The chief obstacle to adding OCaml or-patterns to Haskell (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24700762/or-patterns-in-haskell https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24700762/or-patterns-in-...) seem to be finding a syntax that's both pleasant and fits between the strands of the fine web in ascii space of already valid Haskell programs.
- cafard 10y ago
  The fellow who wrote Expect worked at NIST
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Well RMS didn't go with a unix clone because it was what he wanted, but because he figured it was more likely to get to a working state. At his heart he is always an AI Lab guy, lamenting the demise of the lisp machine.
- kazinator 10y ago
  Here he begins by saying that TCL, in effect, does have Lisp syntax (which "hackers" like) but that the regular non-hacker users will balk at it. This part of his proclamation anticipates and softens the ironic impact of subsequently promoting a Scheme, further mitigated by in the same breath promising the availability of a parallel notation that will provide the blub syntax for non-hackers. (Of course, he was right about a dual syntax approach being viable: today we have virtual machine environments with multiple languages. As a Lisp hacker, Stallman knew about the existing history of such practice, like CGOL for Common Lisp and whatnot.)
- kazinator 10y ago
  In programming, that which you're calling the map is in fact the territory. The analog of a map is design documents: these indicate how the territory is going to be soon, or how it is. In the physical world, we change the territory (e.g. alter the landscape, build). That's what is analogous to coding. It is helpful for the territory and all of its manipulations to be clean and well-organized. This is not just an "obsession" of "university coders".
- groovy2shoes 10y ago
  Tcl and Python (among many others) were also designed by "University coders". When it comes to language design, academic origins tend to have little bearing on how "practical" a language is.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Lisp is still pretty damn practical. I can crank out working code far faster in Scheme than anything else. Because the mental model is so small, you focus more on your design than on getting it to fit your language. And if you like TCL's command syntax, srfi-49[0], srfi-110[1], and srfi-119[2] all push scheme towards that to varying degrees. 0:http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-49/srfi-49.html http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-49/srfi-49.html 1:http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-110/srfi-110.html http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-110/srfi-110.html 2:http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-119/srfi-119.html http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-119/srfi-119.html
gaius 10y ago
Posting on a newsgroup for X that X sucks is the very definition of trolling. Since long before it came to mean "anyone who disagrees with me for any reason".
networked 10y ago
Note that RMS almost certainly did not write the inciting post [1][2]. [1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3891#comment-58302 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3891#comment-58302 [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20110102015130/http://basiscraft.com/0800-0100-the-tcl-war.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110102015130/http://basiscraft...
- hyperpape 10y ago
  Dunno if I'm dense, but reading that second post, I can't figure out if he's saying Lord's name was attached to RMS's post, vice versa, or some third party attached both of their names. I'm guessing you mean it's the second possibility, but I can't figure out how you get to there from reading it.
  - glv 10y ago
    Two things about it make me think that RMS actually wrote it (probably after consultation with Lord). The first is this sentence in that post by Lord: "Who cares if a post occurs under my name that I didn't post so long as I more or less agree with it -- this isn't about ego." The second is writing style. The Tcl War post is classic RMS. Compare it to this reminiscence from Lord and it's hard to imagine they were written by the same person.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - networked 10y ago
      When I wrote my comment above I skimmed through Thomas Lord's essay, found that the parts I remembered being there were all in their place, pasted the link and pressed "submit". In particular, I remembered the paragraph from which you quote as written in a ironic manner, suggesting with a wink at the reader that Lord actually wrote the post. Now that I've reread the essay, I don't see that at all. I think in that paragraph he probably says what he means. That, and you are right about the style. In short, I retract my claim. Sorry to whoever I misled! My confidence was completely misplaced.
amelius 10y ago
See also "Tcl the Misunderstood" [1] An interesting discussion here: [2] [1] http://antirez.com/articoli/tclmisunderstood.html http://antirez.com/articoli/tclmisunderstood.html [2] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3891 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3891
B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
tl;dr: John Ousterhout's reasonable reply: http://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html http://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html , done (Submitted page looks like an Usenet Who's Who index ;-)
- shitgoose 10y ago
  yes, he is good. this is my favourite part: "I didn't design Tcl for building huge programs with 10's or 100's of thousands of lines of Tcl, and I've been pretty surprised that people have used it for huge programs." lots of Tcl criticism stems from the fact that people started using Tcl not in the way it was intended.
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    I have trouble finding things that require more than 10kloc of Tcl but Tcl has been extended since Osterhout sorta faded on it. It has features like namespaces and package management since at least 8.x . Language comparison is always challenging. I've had less trouble with Tcl than with just about any other language. But it rather requires thinking about the problem in certain ways. The main thing it requires is adherence to an event driven model.
- pvg 10y ago
  Yep, should be the top comment. You can save yourself from having to know anything more about this incident by reading that and going back to whatever more interesting thing you were doing before.
- dleslie 10y ago
  The Law is the basis of my concerns for Rust. I love the language, but I feel that using it consists of a considerable amount of yak-shaving; I have a habit of loving languages that violate The Law, Scheme and Haskell being among them.
agumonkey 10y ago
Dived into tcl wiki after writing a program with tkinter (tk python bindings), it's amazing to see a community speak about other paradigms. Reading how they approached FP idioms for instance. I felt this way with perl too. These are two old languages that are mostly ignored nowadays (except for the perl6 has shipped) but they have very interesting ways.
- david-given 10y ago
  If you're interested in Tcl, you might also like to look at TH1: https://www.fossil-scm.org/xfer/doc/trunk/www/th1.md https://www.fossil-scm.org/xfer/doc/trunk/www/th1.md It's a tiny Tcl subset, implemented in only a few kloc. It's used by Fossil as a HTML templating engine but it's easily adaptable for other things. It's small enough to be understood and does an excellent job of demonstrating the core principles of how string-processing languages think.
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    Thanks a lot, this never blipped on my radar, but I love the schemish feel behind the project. ps: th.c is one fun name I failed to anticipate.
  - networked 10y ago
    I was (pleasantly) surprised to find out Fossil used a Tcl-like language for templating. Tiny Tcl implementations are fun in general and perhaps easier to produce than tiny Scheme implementations — as long as you are willing to concede that everything really is a string. :-) (I.e., no caching binary representations; you have to parse from scratch each time.) In a similar vein as TH1 but with a little more functionality there are Picol (https://tcl.wiki/Picol https://tcl.wiki/Picol) and LIL (http://runtimeterror.com/tech/lil/ http://runtimeterror.com/tech/lil/). Disclosure: I maintain an expanded fork of Picol. The original version of it written by antirez was only ~550 LOC but with suchenwi's additions and mine it is now around 3100. There is a link to it on the wiki page. The change that I am most fond of is making it an stb-style (https://github.com/nothings/stb/ https://github.com/nothings/stb/) header library.
SixSigma 10y ago
Inferno, the Bell-Labs system, uses a Tk implementation to lay out the UI. http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/4th_edition/limbotk/ http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/4th_edition/limbotk/
rurban 10y ago
The guile history also mentions the TCL war from their point of view: https://wingolog.org/archives/2009/01/07/a-brief-history-of-guile https://wingolog.org/archives/2009/01/07/a-brief-history-of-... although it misses the important technical details. Stallman was right with his criticism, but could of course convince nobody to add the missing features. Some of them came with 8.5 eventually but support for lexicals (upvar) is still horrible.
NelsonMinar 10y ago
The Guile vaporware was the first time I really lost respect for Stallman and the FSF. It's incredibly damaging to say "don't use TCL use Guile instead" and then never actually produce a useful Guile product. A similar pattern happened in the same timeframe with the Hurd kernel. I have an enormous amount of respect for the FSF. But it has been most effective when it has working code, like gcc or emacs. The political pronouncements not backed up by working code were actively harmful.
- dleslie 10y ago
  IIRC, GnuCash and LilyPond use Guile. The project itself now has some good maintainers, and has been making strides since its 2.0 release. Some parts of the (small) Scheme community have taken notice, and new projects are popping up; like GNU Artanis[0]. Oh ah, and there's Guix[1]. 0: http://web-artanis.com/ http://web-artanis.com/ 1: https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/ https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/
  - andrewflnr 10y ago
    Gimp also uses Guile, I believe.
    - groovy2shoes 10y ago
      The Gimp uses TinySCHEME, actually (it used to use SIOD, iirc, but was replaced with TinySCHEME a while back).
      - cafard 10y ago
        Indeed. The one actual production use I have made of Scheme was in the Gimp--I couldn't get Python-fu to work.
    - gkya 10y ago
      IIRC Gimp was invented even before GTK (i.e. Gimp ToolKit).
  - 10y ago
glv 10y ago
Heh. In a recent overhaul of my site, I considered taking these pages down. But they do still get a reasonable amount of traffic, and I hate broken links. Thanks to amelius for the "Tcl the Misunderstood" link. I agree with that, for the most part. I haven't written Tcl in many years, but I don't think it deserves the reputation that it has.
Paul_S 10y ago
1994? How about 2016 and I'm still living in a nightmare - my company uses tcl ("legacy" scripts). No matter how many times I tried to approach the language with an open mind there is no other language that grinds me down as much. If you think passing a variable name in a string to a function and then using upvar to access it is an acceptable way of returning values then have I got good news for you - we have languages with a sane way of doing it today (heck we've had them for longer than tcl has been around for)! I die every time I have to look up which order arguments come in because of how inconsistent it is, and oh, is it append or lappend or some other crazy keyword? People at the office had this for decades and they still have to use a cheat sheet. Why... There's perl, python, bash, anything god, please, make it stop.
- jt2190 10y ago
  [Warning: Personal anecdote... somewhat off topic.] Around 2003 I was getting very heavily into what we used to call "Dynamic HTML", which of course required programming in JavaScript. At the time JavaScript was looked down upon by most professional programmers as a toy. A toy that had buggy implementations in various browsers, that lacked the strict typing of C++ or Java, that didn't have classical inheritance, that had no good IDE, and, worst of all, that you could create some terribly confusing bugs with. At the time I'd moved to Fort Worth which let me attend the monthly Pragmatic Programmers meetings/dinners at Spring Creek Barbeque in Addison, TX. This was a meeting with a lot of polyglot programmers and "old timers", and there was a prevailing attitude that programming languages were just tools, and a good programmer learned to use many tools well. Anyway, there I was one night ranting about JavaScript to someone I only remember as Chris. I probably chewed his ear off for a long time about how terrible JavaScript was. After what I'm sure was many minutes, I paused to let Chris tell me how much he agreed that JavaScript was terrible. Instead, he simply said: "You need to learn about prototypical inheritance." This caught me off guard. I don't remember if it shut me up, but I hope it did. Fortunately I actually took Chris' advice. While I'd understood that JavaScript had prototypical inheritance, I'd never really taken the time to understand how it really worked. I'd also never really grokked how scopes worked. As I properly learned these features, I started to gain a new respect for the power of the language, and it quickly became my favorite. So, now when I have a strong negative reaction to a new language or tool, I ask myself if I'm reacting because of a fault in the language or if I just don't like that feeling of being less productive because I haven't learned the language yet. Usually it's the latter, which means I need to grit my teeth and bend my brain and learn. (P.S. Chris, if you're reading this: Thank you! I owe you a millions lines of code in grattitude!)
rwmj 10y ago
Having spent the past few weeks debugging a Gtk application, Gtk is such a step backwards from Tk. It's so difficult to predictably lay out a Gtk application in code, things which Tk solved with the beautifully elegant pack and later grid models. The Tcl language OTOH .. awful once you tried to do anything mildly complicated.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  Depends on what you mean by "complicated". My habit is to lay things out in event cross state and for that, it's pretty even. IMO, FSM are awfully good at reducing/decomposing complexity. An FSM in Tcl may look like: array set FSM { init { ... set state two } two { ... } } ... set state init ... eval $FSM($state) I have just put together too many things that would have been severely daunting in any other way in this manner to agree with you.
nurettin 10y ago
>> It lacks arrays; it lacks structures from which you can make linked lists. It fakes having numbers, which works, but has to be slow. Did I miss the rebuttal to this?
- glv 10y ago
  There was a semi-rebuttal … I think in a post from Brent Welch. Tcl does have things called "arrays", and you use them much as you'd expect. Tom Lord confirmed later that what he and RMS meant by this was that it didn't have "true arrays" that are laid out contiguously in memory, to be much more efficient. That's a valid criticism: Tcl's arrays are basically dual-use hash tables, much the same as JavaScript's arrays. The other two things are totally valid. Tcl has no references, so you can't build your own linked list. And all values are (at least semantically) strings, so numeric operations are slow. But of course, a lot can be done to optimize those things in the implementation, and over time at least some of that optimization was done.
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    Lists are a first-class object in Tcl, so it's not clear to me how much of a deficiency not having linked lists is. I've had cases where opening a 'C' program as a pipe and doing heavy number crunching in the 'C' program outperformed native Tcl.
    - glv 10y ago
      Well, right. Tcl was an early example of a trend where key data structures were built into languages and fairly well encapsulated as "one size fits all" abstractions. Computers had become fast enough that for many purposes you didn't have to build a custom list or hash table. That all seems normal to us now, but it was uncommon back then.
    - kazinator 10y ago
      > Lists are a first-class object in Tcl Was that the case in 1994, or are you writing about the current state of Tcl?
_ph_ 10y ago
I both like to use Tcl and Lisp. Tcl and Tk I use for smaller tools and Lisp for larger application programming. While the Tcl syntax indeed is a big rough, its also very simple - I can strongly recommend to read Ousterhouts Tcl book for insights. It is also remarkable, that Tcl is one of the few languages that like Lisp allow the user to define arbitrary syntax elements (e.g. you could rebuild if, for, ...) in the language itself. This is a very powerful feature which allows you to create new abstractions the original language designer did not build in. Beyond that, Tcl comes with a rather complete runtime, and using tclkit, you can very easily create standalone and small (<2M) installation-free packages out of your program. This is very valuable, especially if you have to distribute to Windows. This is where Tcl easily pulls ahead of a lot of languages. And often I use Tk for the user interface of my Lisp programs via Ltk, which brings both together.
drdoom 10y ago
I have used Lisp, Scheme, Prolog (and multiple dialects of each) for extended periods in large projects. Each was a pleasure to work with. They all have their own advantages. I am not sure if there is value in arguing over x feature of one language vs. y of another. As a matter of fact, it was fun to write Prolog interpreters in Lisp, and Lisp interpreters in Prolog, for example. (Many courses / textbooks (used to) present these as side projects to do and the task is simpler than it sounds.) One could say Tcl is really an extension of Lisp or Prolog in its core concepts of syntax, data and program equality, style of interpretation, etc. I agree wholeheartedly with the last paragraph of Mr. Ousterhout's reply here - and I must say, a smart, classy and almost Tcl-ish way of a jab at its distractors: http://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html http://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html I came across Tcl/Tk while doing Motif in a large C-based project. I simply couldn't believe how powerful, simple and succint Tk was compared to Motif (or anything else since). And it ran on Windows, Unix, Linux and Mac OS, to boot. It was too late for that project to switch, but all my other projects have used Tk if they ever needed a UI. Similarly with Tcl. I still think the best introduction is Mr. Ousterhout's original Tcl/Tk book. It stands as one of the best language books on my shelf. Combined with Tk, one can put together a working application prototype in no time. Of course, this was eons ago. Nowadays, Tcl offers one of the best environments with a complete set of packages ranging from web servers to image and sound processing. Plus, you can distirbute your program and all of its media and support files easily as well. I believe Tcl has been mischaracterized and has suffered in terms of open popularity. But for insiders, it remains as one of those secret indispensable Ninja tools that is used over and over again for competitive advantage.
- Drdrdrq 10y ago
  A bit off topic: did you really use Prolog for something else than just research? That is, did you write software that was used in production? I have learned it many years ago but always had a nagging feeling that it is better to use a "normal" language with AI libraries if you need the program to actually do something... Did I miss anything?
  - drdoom 10y ago
    Most of my Prolog experience was in academics - for my own research as well as for maintaining some existing packages. But I did get to use it outside as well. There are many cases where a controlled language is needed or comes in handy and solves a lot of issues. This is where Prolog shines - plus you get to use a lot of the previous stuff you developed as well. When it comes to an "AI" language vs. typical language with an "AI" library, I will just repeat a phrase that is often used in the field: what you thinnk of as an AI problem today will no longer be considered AI tomorrow, since it will then be well-understood and implemented in many places. People used to say that in response to the (seeming lack of) progress AI had made to date. A good example of that is Siri or Amazon Echo. Not many people consider it an AI problem anymore, or so it seems.
DonHopkins 10y ago
Around the time leading up to the TCL war, Lua was peacefully and quietly born in a manger at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: "In 1993, the only real contender was Tcl, which had been explicitly designed to be embedded into applications. However, Tcl had unfamiliar syntax, did not offer good support for data description, and ran only on Unix platforms. We did not consider LISP or Scheme because of their unfriendly syntax. Python was still in its infancy. In the free, do-it-yourself atmosphere that then reigned in Tecgraf, it was quite natural that we should try to develop our own scripting language ... Because many potential users of the language were not professional programmers, the language should avoid cryptic syntax and semantics. The implementation of the new language should be highly portable, because Tecgraf's clients had a very diverse collection of computer platforms. Finally, since we expected that other Tecgraf products would also need to embed a scripting language, the new language should follow the example of SOL and be provided as a library with a C API." http://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf http://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf
vram22 10y ago
There was an interesting article by Ousterhout (Tcl creator) about scripting languages versus system programming languages some years ago. I think I read it in one of the print computer magazines that existed at the time - Software Development Magazine, Unix Review, Dr. Dobb's Journal, C User's Journal, or some such. I wonder whether he was inspired to write that article after this post (mentioned elsewhere in this thread): http://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html http://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html
- bch 10y ago
  Are you referring to this: http://www.tcl.tk/doc/scripting.html http://www.tcl.tk/doc/scripting.html ?
  - vram22 10y ago
    Just took a quick look at it. Need to read more, which I will, but pretty sure it is that one. I doubt he would write more than one article on that topic, also it is slightly long (about 24 PgDn keystrokes on my PC :), which I remember from before. Excellent. I thought of googling for relevant keywords to check if the article was online (after posting my previous comment here), but you saved me the trouble. Thanks!
  - vram22 10y ago
    Looked at it a bit more - yes, that is the one.
jrapdx3 10y ago
To my mind, there's a tremendous irony in the 1994 flame war. A user of Tcl since the 1990's I'd read, and been amused by, the hyperbole contained in those long-ago comments a number of times. Not that flaming doesn't still happen, such emotion isn't hard to find, though the subjects in dispute vary, the form of battle remains the same. Goes without saying that there's a nub of truth in those ancient rants. Tcl can be kind of hard to catch on to, but then again, the Gnu "replacement", the Guile implementation of Scheme, is also hardly a mainstream favorite. Plenty of hate is expressed toward Lisp-derived fully parenthesized languages, Scheme included. The not-so-dirty secret in the "language war" is that Tcl is itself very much a Lisp-like language, and over the years has increasingly adopted many features that make it even closer to languages like Scheme. Having become reasonably fluent in both Tcl and Scheme I see similarities that outweigh syntactic differences. Not identical of course, but translating programs across them is fairly straightforward compared to C-like code, e.g., Javascript. Maybe Lisp derivatives are an acquired taste, or maybe there some inborn twisted brain thing that entices some and repels others. At any rate, I'm convinced Tcl and Scheme are very capable languages, admittedly different in approach vs. more commonly used systems. Looking back it is ever so obvious that the old war was fought between two sects of the same tribe, and isn't that often the source of the fiercest rivalries.
blacksqr 10y ago
It so happens that the 14th annual European Tcl/Tk users conference just took place [1]. Quick perusal of the event site shows the breadth of uses Tcl is still being put to (enthusiastically, by programmers who choose to use it): * nuclear power plant operations * high-performance visualization and analysis of microscopic images. * design analysis of high-resolution camera light sensors. * embedded programming of Cortex-M3 ARM v7-Microcontroller. * satellite control systems. * multi-platform/compiler automated C++ library compilation. * customization of the Fossil VCS. * scripting and visual programming on Android. * communicating sequential process programming. * Linux D-Bus scripting. Slag Tcl all you want, but it's still being used every day by brilliant programmers to ship real products, in environments where reliability is crucial. How does Guile stack up to that? Or any other unfashionable programming language for that matter? Maybe more effort should be put into understanding what these programmers see in Tcl that the critics can't. [1] http://www.eurotcl.tcl3d.org/index.html http://www.eurotcl.tcl3d.org/index.html
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Coming in from the harsh fronts of YouTube, Reddit and 4Chan, this is an awfully tame flame war. In any case, a lot of good points are raised by both sides. As an Emacs user, I appreciate Stallman's points, but he does make a fatal mistake, in that he doesn't include popular extensions like itcl in his evaluation. That's like evaluating lisp without considering popular macros, or the potential of macros. While that doesn't alleviate the problems Stallman has with tcl's lack of datastructures, those are not insurmountable with a couple of well-written C-extensions, assuming that tcl's C interop is any good at all. Also, tcl is a pretty terrible lisp, as although they have a lot on common, the differences are substantial enough for fans of one to have some degree of distaste for the other. The most entertaining part is that Stallman criticises tcl for lacking common datastructures, being slow, and having bizarre syntax that appeals to hackers alone. ESR (and, I believe, Stallman, although I am unsure), goes on to note the common use of dynamic scope, confusing quoting mechanism, and the horrors of upvar and upvalue. Gee. DOES THAT. SOUND. FAMILIAR? If it does, it's because most of those problems also appeared in MacLisp, the direct predecessor to Common Lisp. Many of them also appear in other lisps: Linked lists, an unusual datastructure, are one of the few well supported by Lisp. Lisp used to be quite slow, and many implementations still are. Dynamic scope is still the default in elisp, and macros just barely hold the system together when you're writing lots of code, a cicumstance that Stallman claims elisp is actually better in than tcl. As for confusing quoting, `(there ,(is 'quite) ,@(a lot) of that in lisp). And upvar and upvalue are in some ways less dangerous than macros. Actually, lisp used to have its own version of upvar and upvalue, coupled with a mechanism called the fexpr that let you get rid of a lot of the quotes. These were not implemented in most later lisps, due to the fact that they are nearly impossible to optimize well. At the end of the day, whether you love or hate tcl and lisp, there are people out there that are stuck using far worse extension languages. Like these poor sods: https://gitlab.com/xonotic/xonotic/wikis/QuakeC/Introduction_to_QuakeC https://gitlab.com/xonotic/xonotic/wikis/QuakeC/Introduction....

The Tcl War (1994)

85 points by akkartik 10y ago

I love how RMS always begin is war on language with "it does not have a LISP/scheme syntax". University coders and their obsession of purity of syntax (map/purity) superior to actually dealing with the true problem of the hardware is looking (territory/practicality) is looking for me like an Aristolecian argument of superiority of the style over the «getting things done». Well, as spotted in the answers, expect is a nice non university bred innovation (is it?) that is still a de facto standard in handling interactive session (stateful) with a simple syntax that helps getting things done with maintainable code. It is ported in Perl, python ... and I think this is probably a point for what Tcl is worthy : getting things done. Practicality beats purity. And as of today it is still the most portable way to write embeddable graphical user interface that have good FFI.

eru 10y ago
Lisps ain't particularly pure.. They are closer to the practical side of things. RMS is of course a bit nuts, and perhaps living in some kind of ivory tower, but it's not the academic ivory tower.
- _acme 10y ago
  I thought he literally lived in one of MIT's office/academic buildings rather than having an actual apartment?
  - eru 10y ago
    Oh, I meant where he's living intellectually. But I think my perception of what classifies an academic is pretty skewed: I managed to code Haskell for money for the first five years of my career (now still sneaking it in at Google in my 20% time), and don't consider myself an academic at all. Perhaps I also have a European bias here. After the war, the Americans got to play with their computers early on, and their academics ended up with Lisp. The European computer scientists had to wait, and thus had nothing better to do but think. They ended up with types and ML (the family that Haskell sprang from). These days, it seems that the European tradition has firmly won in the most academic parts of computer science. Lisps are still around, and with Clojure have seen more mainstream success that ever before. But in Academia the only Lispers left standing seem to be the Schemers, and they have warmed up to static types, too. (They did some great work on contracts.)
yenda 10y ago
It wasn't RMS who wrote this post, it was a prank
- glv 10y ago
  It did later come out that Tom Lord wrote it, but not as a prank; he was working with RMS to build Guile, and this was the opening salvo in trying to build the case for it. RMS did post it under his own name.
- SFJulie 10y ago
  Well, fake money is well done when it looks as good as the original :) Just for saying I did not invent the lisp/scheme obsession directly from his web page[1] : The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't know what it means for a programming language to be powerful and elegant. Once you learn Lisp, you will see what is lacking in most other languages. [1] https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
agumonkey 10y ago
Lisp is close to syntaxless. What "lisp syntax" means is principled to the bones systems, including syntax. The fact that everything in lisp was in recursively defined lists meant you could reuse recursive thinking everywhere. An `infinite` tower of reuse. You get genericity, pattern matching, combinatorial generation for very low cost. It's not practical for people crunching data or opening files .. but whenever you need to attack something a little more complex the 'practicality' argument shift sides.
- lawpoop 10y ago
  Well, if he meant "it doesn't have S-expressions", he should have said that. That's not an unreasonable expectation for a guy who is otherwise a pedant in almost all other areas of his life.
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    Fair point, and to be honest, it's a common problem in many places. People enjoying a property often fail to communicate it clearly with those who never did. Math, and I believe Lisp has many times more inherited math genes than other languages, is especially guilty of this. It's often a lethal cultural shock.
    - eru 10y ago
      S-Expressions are fun. When I first learned a Lisp, Scheme in my case, I found them weird but could see the appeal. When I learned Haskell afterwards, it was the opposite: I thought I'd miss S-Expressions, but I learned to like its more baroque syntax. S-Expressions have the chief virtue of making even the most crude macro look no different from the most over-engineered builtin to the language from the user's point of view. And they clearly separate the syntactical space in the language, so that new features (whether as macro or built-in) can always find a space. Compare to the cracks of C they had to fit C++ into. Haskell might be even worse. The chief obstacle to adding OCaml or-patterns to Haskell (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24700762/or-patterns-in-haskell https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24700762/or-patterns-in-...) seem to be finding a syntax that's both pleasant and fits between the strands of the fine web in ascii space of already valid Haskell programs.
cafard 10y ago
The fellow who wrote Expect worked at NIST
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
digi_owl 10y ago
Well RMS didn't go with a unix clone because it was what he wanted, but because he figured it was more likely to get to a working state. At his heart he is always an AI Lab guy, lamenting the demise of the lisp machine.
kazinator 10y ago
Here he begins by saying that TCL, in effect, does have Lisp syntax (which "hackers" like) but that the regular non-hacker users will balk at it. This part of his proclamation anticipates and softens the ironic impact of subsequently promoting a Scheme, further mitigated by in the same breath promising the availability of a parallel notation that will provide the blub syntax for non-hackers. (Of course, he was right about a dual syntax approach being viable: today we have virtual machine environments with multiple languages. As a Lisp hacker, Stallman knew about the existing history of such practice, like CGOL for Common Lisp and whatnot.)
kazinator 10y ago
In programming, that which you're calling the map is in fact the territory. The analog of a map is design documents: these indicate how the territory is going to be soon, or how it is. In the physical world, we change the territory (e.g. alter the landscape, build). That's what is analogous to coding. It is helpful for the territory and all of its manipulations to be clean and well-organized. This is not just an "obsession" of "university coders".
groovy2shoes 10y ago
Tcl and Python (among many others) were also designed by "University coders". When it comes to language design, academic origins tend to have little bearing on how "practical" a language is.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Lisp is still pretty damn practical. I can crank out working code far faster in Scheme than anything else. Because the mental model is so small, you focus more on your design than on getting it to fit your language. And if you like TCL's command syntax, srfi-49[0], srfi-110[1], and srfi-119[2] all push scheme towards that to varying degrees. 0:http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-49/srfi-49.html http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-49/srfi-49.html 1:http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-110/srfi-110.html http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-110/srfi-110.html 2:http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-119/srfi-119.html http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-119/srfi-119.html

gaius 10y ago

Posting on a newsgroup for X that X sucks is the very definition of trolling. Since long before it came to mean "anyone who disagrees with me for any reason".

networked 10y ago

Note that RMS almost certainly did not write the inciting post [1][2]. [1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3891#comment-58302 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3891#comment-58302 [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20110102015130/http://basiscraft.com/0800-0100-the-tcl-war.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110102015130/http://basiscraft...

hyperpape 10y ago
Dunno if I'm dense, but reading that second post, I can't figure out if he's saying Lord's name was attached to RMS's post, vice versa, or some third party attached both of their names. I'm guessing you mean it's the second possibility, but I can't figure out how you get to there from reading it.
- glv 10y ago
  Two things about it make me think that RMS actually wrote it (probably after consultation with Lord). The first is this sentence in that post by Lord: "Who cares if a post occurs under my name that I didn't post so long as I more or less agree with it -- this isn't about ego." The second is writing style. The Tcl War post is classic RMS. Compare it to this reminiscence from Lord and it's hard to imagine they were written by the same person.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - networked 10y ago
    When I wrote my comment above I skimmed through Thomas Lord's essay, found that the parts I remembered being there were all in their place, pasted the link and pressed "submit". In particular, I remembered the paragraph from which you quote as written in a ironic manner, suggesting with a wink at the reader that Lord actually wrote the post. Now that I've reread the essay, I don't see that at all. I think in that paragraph he probably says what he means. That, and you are right about the style. In short, I retract my claim. Sorry to whoever I misled! My confidence was completely misplaced.

amelius 10y ago

See also "Tcl the Misunderstood" [1] An interesting discussion here: [2] [1] http://antirez.com/articoli/tclmisunderstood.html http://antirez.com/articoli/tclmisunderstood.html [2] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3891 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3891

B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago

tl;dr: John Ousterhout's reasonable reply: http://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html http://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html , done (Submitted page looks like an Usenet Who's Who index ;-)

shitgoose 10y ago
yes, he is good. this is my favourite part: "I didn't design Tcl for building huge programs with 10's or 100's of thousands of lines of Tcl, and I've been pretty surprised that people have used it for huge programs." lots of Tcl criticism stems from the fact that people started using Tcl not in the way it was intended.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  I have trouble finding things that require more than 10kloc of Tcl but Tcl has been extended since Osterhout sorta faded on it. It has features like namespaces and package management since at least 8.x . Language comparison is always challenging. I've had less trouble with Tcl than with just about any other language. But it rather requires thinking about the problem in certain ways. The main thing it requires is adherence to an event driven model.
pvg 10y ago
Yep, should be the top comment. You can save yourself from having to know anything more about this incident by reading that and going back to whatever more interesting thing you were doing before.
dleslie 10y ago
The Law is the basis of my concerns for Rust. I love the language, but I feel that using it consists of a considerable amount of yak-shaving; I have a habit of loving languages that violate The Law, Scheme and Haskell being among them.

agumonkey 10y ago

Dived into tcl wiki after writing a program with tkinter (tk python bindings), it's amazing to see a community speak about other paradigms. Reading how they approached FP idioms for instance. I felt this way with perl too. These are two old languages that are mostly ignored nowadays (except for the perl6 has shipped) but they have very interesting ways.

david-given 10y ago
If you're interested in Tcl, you might also like to look at TH1: https://www.fossil-scm.org/xfer/doc/trunk/www/th1.md https://www.fossil-scm.org/xfer/doc/trunk/www/th1.md It's a tiny Tcl subset, implemented in only a few kloc. It's used by Fossil as a HTML templating engine but it's easily adaptable for other things. It's small enough to be understood and does an excellent job of demonstrating the core principles of how string-processing languages think.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Thanks a lot, this never blipped on my radar, but I love the schemish feel behind the project. ps: th.c is one fun name I failed to anticipate.
- networked 10y ago
  I was (pleasantly) surprised to find out Fossil used a Tcl-like language for templating. Tiny Tcl implementations are fun in general and perhaps easier to produce than tiny Scheme implementations — as long as you are willing to concede that everything really is a string. :-) (I.e., no caching binary representations; you have to parse from scratch each time.) In a similar vein as TH1 but with a little more functionality there are Picol (https://tcl.wiki/Picol https://tcl.wiki/Picol) and LIL (http://runtimeterror.com/tech/lil/ http://runtimeterror.com/tech/lil/). Disclosure: I maintain an expanded fork of Picol. The original version of it written by antirez was only ~550 LOC but with suchenwi's additions and mine it is now around 3100. There is a link to it on the wiki page. The change that I am most fond of is making it an stb-style (https://github.com/nothings/stb/ https://github.com/nothings/stb/) header library.

SixSigma 10y ago

Inferno, the Bell-Labs system, uses a Tk implementation to lay out the UI. http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/4th_edition/limbotk/ http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/4th_edition/limbotk/

rurban 10y ago

The guile history also mentions the TCL war from their point of view: https://wingolog.org/archives/2009/01/07/a-brief-history-of-guile https://wingolog.org/archives/2009/01/07/a-brief-history-of-... although it misses the important technical details. Stallman was right with his criticism, but could of course convince nobody to add the missing features. Some of them came with 8.5 eventually but support for lexicals (upvar) is still horrible.

NelsonMinar 10y ago

The Guile vaporware was the first time I really lost respect for Stallman and the FSF. It's incredibly damaging to say "don't use TCL use Guile instead" and then never actually produce a useful Guile product. A similar pattern happened in the same timeframe with the Hurd kernel. I have an enormous amount of respect for the FSF. But it has been most effective when it has working code, like gcc or emacs. The political pronouncements not backed up by working code were actively harmful.

dleslie 10y ago
IIRC, GnuCash and LilyPond use Guile. The project itself now has some good maintainers, and has been making strides since its 2.0 release. Some parts of the (small) Scheme community have taken notice, and new projects are popping up; like GNU Artanis[0]. Oh ah, and there's Guix[1]. 0: http://web-artanis.com/ http://web-artanis.com/ 1: https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/ https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/
- andrewflnr 10y ago
  Gimp also uses Guile, I believe.
  - groovy2shoes 10y ago
    The Gimp uses TinySCHEME, actually (it used to use SIOD, iirc, but was replaced with TinySCHEME a while back).
    - cafard 10y ago
      Indeed. The one actual production use I have made of Scheme was in the Gimp--I couldn't get Python-fu to work.
  - gkya 10y ago
    IIRC Gimp was invented even before GTK (i.e. Gimp ToolKit).
- 10y ago

glv 10y ago

Heh. In a recent overhaul of my site, I considered taking these pages down. But they do still get a reasonable amount of traffic, and I hate broken links. Thanks to amelius for the "Tcl the Misunderstood" link. I agree with that, for the most part. I haven't written Tcl in many years, but I don't think it deserves the reputation that it has.

Paul_S 10y ago

1994? How about 2016 and I'm still living in a nightmare - my company uses tcl ("legacy" scripts). No matter how many times I tried to approach the language with an open mind there is no other language that grinds me down as much. If you think passing a variable name in a string to a function and then using upvar to access it is an acceptable way of returning values then have I got good news for you - we have languages with a sane way of doing it today (heck we've had them for longer than tcl has been around for)! I die every time I have to look up which order arguments come in because of how inconsistent it is, and oh, is it append or lappend or some other crazy keyword? People at the office had this for decades and they still have to use a cheat sheet. Why... There's perl, python, bash, anything god, please, make it stop.

jt2190 10y ago
[Warning: Personal anecdote... somewhat off topic.] Around 2003 I was getting very heavily into what we used to call "Dynamic HTML", which of course required programming in JavaScript. At the time JavaScript was looked down upon by most professional programmers as a toy. A toy that had buggy implementations in various browsers, that lacked the strict typing of C++ or Java, that didn't have classical inheritance, that had no good IDE, and, worst of all, that you could create some terribly confusing bugs with. At the time I'd moved to Fort Worth which let me attend the monthly Pragmatic Programmers meetings/dinners at Spring Creek Barbeque in Addison, TX. This was a meeting with a lot of polyglot programmers and "old timers", and there was a prevailing attitude that programming languages were just tools, and a good programmer learned to use many tools well. Anyway, there I was one night ranting about JavaScript to someone I only remember as Chris. I probably chewed his ear off for a long time about how terrible JavaScript was. After what I'm sure was many minutes, I paused to let Chris tell me how much he agreed that JavaScript was terrible. Instead, he simply said: "You need to learn about prototypical inheritance." This caught me off guard. I don't remember if it shut me up, but I hope it did. Fortunately I actually took Chris' advice. While I'd understood that JavaScript had prototypical inheritance, I'd never really taken the time to understand how it really worked. I'd also never really grokked how scopes worked. As I properly learned these features, I started to gain a new respect for the power of the language, and it quickly became my favorite. So, now when I have a strong negative reaction to a new language or tool, I ask myself if I'm reacting because of a fault in the language or if I just don't like that feeling of being less productive because I haven't learned the language yet. Usually it's the latter, which means I need to grit my teeth and bend my brain and learn. (P.S. Chris, if you're reading this: Thank you! I owe you a millions lines of code in grattitude!)

rwmj 10y ago

Having spent the past few weeks debugging a Gtk application, Gtk is such a step backwards from Tk. It's so difficult to predictably lay out a Gtk application in code, things which Tk solved with the beautifully elegant pack and later grid models. The Tcl language OTOH .. awful once you tried to do anything mildly complicated.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago
Depends on what you mean by "complicated". My habit is to lay things out in event cross state and for that, it's pretty even. IMO, FSM are awfully good at reducing/decomposing complexity. An FSM in Tcl may look like: array set FSM { init { ... set state two } two { ... } } ... set state init ... eval $FSM($state) I have just put together too many things that would have been severely daunting in any other way in this manner to agree with you.

nurettin 10y ago

>> It lacks arrays; it lacks structures from which you can make linked lists. It fakes having numbers, which works, but has to be slow. Did I miss the rebuttal to this?

glv 10y ago
There was a semi-rebuttal … I think in a post from Brent Welch. Tcl does have things called "arrays", and you use them much as you'd expect. Tom Lord confirmed later that what he and RMS meant by this was that it didn't have "true arrays" that are laid out contiguously in memory, to be much more efficient. That's a valid criticism: Tcl's arrays are basically dual-use hash tables, much the same as JavaScript's arrays. The other two things are totally valid. Tcl has no references, so you can't build your own linked list. And all values are (at least semantically) strings, so numeric operations are slow. But of course, a lot can be done to optimize those things in the implementation, and over time at least some of that optimization was done.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  Lists are a first-class object in Tcl, so it's not clear to me how much of a deficiency not having linked lists is. I've had cases where opening a 'C' program as a pipe and doing heavy number crunching in the 'C' program outperformed native Tcl.
  - glv 10y ago
    Well, right. Tcl was an early example of a trend where key data structures were built into languages and fairly well encapsulated as "one size fits all" abstractions. Computers had become fast enough that for many purposes you didn't have to build a custom list or hash table. That all seems normal to us now, but it was uncommon back then.
  - kazinator 10y ago
    > Lists are a first-class object in Tcl Was that the case in 1994, or are you writing about the current state of Tcl?

_ph_ 10y ago

I both like to use Tcl and Lisp. Tcl and Tk I use for smaller tools and Lisp for larger application programming. While the Tcl syntax indeed is a big rough, its also very simple - I can strongly recommend to read Ousterhouts Tcl book for insights. It is also remarkable, that Tcl is one of the few languages that like Lisp allow the user to define arbitrary syntax elements (e.g. you could rebuild if, for, ...) in the language itself. This is a very powerful feature which allows you to create new abstractions the original language designer did not build in. Beyond that, Tcl comes with a rather complete runtime, and using tclkit, you can very easily create standalone and small (<2M) installation-free packages out of your program. This is very valuable, especially if you have to distribute to Windows. This is where Tcl easily pulls ahead of a lot of languages. And often I use Tk for the user interface of my Lisp programs via Ltk, which brings both together.

drdoom 10y ago

I have used Lisp, Scheme, Prolog (and multiple dialects of each) for extended periods in large projects. Each was a pleasure to work with. They all have their own advantages. I am not sure if there is value in arguing over x feature of one language vs. y of another. As a matter of fact, it was fun to write Prolog interpreters in Lisp, and Lisp interpreters in Prolog, for example. (Many courses / textbooks (used to) present these as side projects to do and the task is simpler than it sounds.) One could say Tcl is really an extension of Lisp or Prolog in its core concepts of syntax, data and program equality, style of interpretation, etc. I agree wholeheartedly with the last paragraph of Mr. Ousterhout's reply here - and I must say, a smart, classy and almost Tcl-ish way of a jab at its distractors: http://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html http://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html I came across Tcl/Tk while doing Motif in a large C-based project. I simply couldn't believe how powerful, simple and succint Tk was compared to Motif (or anything else since). And it ran on Windows, Unix, Linux and Mac OS, to boot. It was too late for that project to switch, but all my other projects have used Tk if they ever needed a UI. Similarly with Tcl. I still think the best introduction is Mr. Ousterhout's original Tcl/Tk book. It stands as one of the best language books on my shelf. Combined with Tk, one can put together a working application prototype in no time. Of course, this was eons ago. Nowadays, Tcl offers one of the best environments with a complete set of packages ranging from web servers to image and sound processing. Plus, you can distirbute your program and all of its media and support files easily as well. I believe Tcl has been mischaracterized and has suffered in terms of open popularity. But for insiders, it remains as one of those secret indispensable Ninja tools that is used over and over again for competitive advantage.

Drdrdrq 10y ago
A bit off topic: did you really use Prolog for something else than just research? That is, did you write software that was used in production? I have learned it many years ago but always had a nagging feeling that it is better to use a "normal" language with AI libraries if you need the program to actually do something... Did I miss anything?
- drdoom 10y ago
  Most of my Prolog experience was in academics - for my own research as well as for maintaining some existing packages. But I did get to use it outside as well. There are many cases where a controlled language is needed or comes in handy and solves a lot of issues. This is where Prolog shines - plus you get to use a lot of the previous stuff you developed as well. When it comes to an "AI" language vs. typical language with an "AI" library, I will just repeat a phrase that is often used in the field: what you thinnk of as an AI problem today will no longer be considered AI tomorrow, since it will then be well-understood and implemented in many places. People used to say that in response to the (seeming lack of) progress AI had made to date. A good example of that is Siri or Amazon Echo. Not many people consider it an AI problem anymore, or so it seems.

DonHopkins 10y ago

Around the time leading up to the TCL war, Lua was peacefully and quietly born in a manger at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: "In 1993, the only real contender was Tcl, which had been explicitly designed to be embedded into applications. However, Tcl had unfamiliar syntax, did not offer good support for data description, and ran only on Unix platforms. We did not consider LISP or Scheme because of their unfriendly syntax. Python was still in its infancy. In the free, do-it-yourself atmosphere that then reigned in Tecgraf, it was quite natural that we should try to develop our own scripting language ... Because many potential users of the language were not professional programmers, the language should avoid cryptic syntax and semantics. The implementation of the new language should be highly portable, because Tecgraf's clients had a very diverse collection of computer platforms. Finally, since we expected that other Tecgraf products would also need to embed a scripting language, the new language should follow the example of SOL and be provided as a library with a C API." http://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf http://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf

vram22 10y ago

There was an interesting article by Ousterhout (Tcl creator) about scripting languages versus system programming languages some years ago. I think I read it in one of the print computer magazines that existed at the time - Software Development Magazine, Unix Review, Dr. Dobb's Journal, C User's Journal, or some such. I wonder whether he was inspired to write that article after this post (mentioned elsewhere in this thread): http://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html http://vanderburg.org/old_pages/Tcl/war/0009.html

bch 10y ago
Are you referring to this: http://www.tcl.tk/doc/scripting.html http://www.tcl.tk/doc/scripting.html ?
- vram22 10y ago
  Just took a quick look at it. Need to read more, which I will, but pretty sure it is that one. I doubt he would write more than one article on that topic, also it is slightly long (about 24 PgDn keystrokes on my PC :), which I remember from before. Excellent. I thought of googling for relevant keywords to check if the article was online (after posting my previous comment here), but you saved me the trouble. Thanks!
- vram22 10y ago
  Looked at it a bit more - yes, that is the one.

jrapdx3 10y ago

To my mind, there's a tremendous irony in the 1994 flame war. A user of Tcl since the 1990's I'd read, and been amused by, the hyperbole contained in those long-ago comments a number of times. Not that flaming doesn't still happen, such emotion isn't hard to find, though the subjects in dispute vary, the form of battle remains the same. Goes without saying that there's a nub of truth in those ancient rants. Tcl can be kind of hard to catch on to, but then again, the Gnu "replacement", the Guile implementation of Scheme, is also hardly a mainstream favorite. Plenty of hate is expressed toward Lisp-derived fully parenthesized languages, Scheme included. The not-so-dirty secret in the "language war" is that Tcl is itself very much a Lisp-like language, and over the years has increasingly adopted many features that make it even closer to languages like Scheme. Having become reasonably fluent in both Tcl and Scheme I see similarities that outweigh syntactic differences. Not identical of course, but translating programs across them is fairly straightforward compared to C-like code, e.g., Javascript. Maybe Lisp derivatives are an acquired taste, or maybe there some inborn twisted brain thing that entices some and repels others. At any rate, I'm convinced Tcl and Scheme are very capable languages, admittedly different in approach vs. more commonly used systems. Looking back it is ever so obvious that the old war was fought between two sects of the same tribe, and isn't that often the source of the fiercest rivalries.

blacksqr 10y ago

It so happens that the 14th annual European Tcl/Tk users conference just took place [1]. Quick perusal of the event site shows the breadth of uses Tcl is still being put to (enthusiastically, by programmers who choose to use it): * nuclear power plant operations * high-performance visualization and analysis of microscopic images. * design analysis of high-resolution camera light sensors. * embedded programming of Cortex-M3 ARM v7-Microcontroller. * satellite control systems. * multi-platform/compiler automated C++ library compilation. * customization of the Fossil VCS. * scripting and visual programming on Android. * communicating sequential process programming. * Linux D-Bus scripting. Slag Tcl all you want, but it's still being used every day by brilliant programmers to ship real products, in environments where reliability is crucial. How does Guile stack up to that? Or any other unfashionable programming language for that matter? Maybe more effort should be put into understanding what these programmers see in Tcl that the critics can't. [1] http://www.eurotcl.tcl3d.org/index.html http://www.eurotcl.tcl3d.org/index.html

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

Coming in from the harsh fronts of YouTube, Reddit and 4Chan, this is an awfully tame flame war. In any case, a lot of good points are raised by both sides. As an Emacs user, I appreciate Stallman's points, but he does make a fatal mistake, in that he doesn't include popular extensions like itcl in his evaluation. That's like evaluating lisp without considering popular macros, or the potential of macros. While that doesn't alleviate the problems Stallman has with tcl's lack of datastructures, those are not insurmountable with a couple of well-written C-extensions, assuming that tcl's C interop is any good at all. Also, tcl is a pretty terrible lisp, as although they have a lot on common, the differences are substantial enough for fans of one to have some degree of distaste for the other. The most entertaining part is that Stallman criticises tcl for lacking common datastructures, being slow, and having bizarre syntax that appeals to hackers alone. ESR (and, I believe, Stallman, although I am unsure), goes on to note the common use of dynamic scope, confusing quoting mechanism, and the horrors of upvar and upvalue. Gee. DOES THAT. SOUND. FAMILIAR? If it does, it's because most of those problems also appeared in MacLisp, the direct predecessor to Common Lisp. Many of them also appear in other lisps: Linked lists, an unusual datastructure, are one of the few well supported by Lisp. Lisp used to be quite slow, and many implementations still are. Dynamic scope is still the default in elisp, and macros just barely hold the system together when you're writing lots of code, a cicumstance that Stallman claims elisp is actually better in than tcl. As for confusing quoting, `(there ,(is 'quite) ,@(a lot) of that in lisp). And upvar and upvalue are in some ways less dangerous than macros. Actually, lisp used to have its own version of upvar and upvalue, coupled with a mechanism called the fexpr that let you get rid of a lot of the quotes. These were not implemented in most later lisps, due to the fact that they are nearly impossible to optimize well. At the end of the day, whether you love or hate tcl and lisp, there are people out there that are stuck using far worse extension languages. Like these poor sods: https://gitlab.com/xonotic/xonotic/wikis/QuakeC/Introduction_to_QuakeC https://gitlab.com/xonotic/xonotic/wikis/QuakeC/Introduction....